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Wednesday, August 13, 2014

One Final Post...

FEBRUARY 2015 UPDATE: My essay, The Bad Wife, was published in the January 2015 issue of PANK Magazine, a badass print and online literary journal with tons of edgy, insightful and luscious prose and poems. Go read PANK!Suburban Soliloquy has closed its doors. You can find me, now, at Banks of Noon(where I'm cross-posting the below piece), a new writing blog. I'm also taking this opportunity to introduce you to four friends and cohorts, from different pockets of the USA, who are genuinely gifted writers.

I'm deeply grateful for all your support and for your friendship over the years, and I hope to see you around town in the future. :)

Writing Process Blog Tour

My friend and partner-in-crime, Maria
Mutch—the boot-rockin' ingenious writer—tagged me some weeks ago when she
posted her contribution to “The Writing Process Blog Tour.” She asked me to
answer four questions about my writing process, and my first thought was: No! I
don't have a process! But Maria, author of, among many other brilliant works of
art, the poignant Know the Night: A Memoir of Survival in the Small
Hours, possesses criminal powers of persuasion, and she forced me to
confront the challenge (i.e., my fears). I’ve known Maria for some years now
(we met in a writing workshop when her memoir was still in its infancy), and I
know how brave and tenacious she is, and that she would not let me off the hook
easily, and so...

Currently, I am working on completing
my thesis in partial fulfillment for my MFA degree in Writing and Literature
from the Bennington Writing Seminars, Bennington College. My thesis consists of
a collection of essays, a few prose poems, and perhaps a song and some
photographs. Okay, well, maybe not a song. Aside from the pseudo-scholarly
work, I’m also writing one or two essays that address the complexities of
conserving historic and open space in suburbia. Unfortunately, that exercise
involves dipping into politics, which is something I’m allergic to. I’m
sneezing a lot lately.

How does the work differ from others
of its genre? I have trouble with that
word—genre. (The hoodlum in me wants to confiscate genre from the landscape of
literature and bury its burden deep in the earth). I don’t know how to
categorize what I’m working on, so I can’t say how it differs, other than that
my essays are my essays (until they become the reader’s) and are of a somewhat
fractured nature. They are not necessarily crafted with a central theme in
mind, however, a thematic concern (danger, uncertainty, fear) does
seem to emerge as I piece my thesis together. But I don’t think about these things when I’m writing.
Sometimes I feel like I’m not thinking at all, and sometimes I’m thinking so
much it hurts.

Why do you write what you do?
Writing has been my passion for
as long as I can remember. (These days that’s not too long.) So has
photography. I've written off and on for years, it' in my blood, I come from a
family of logophiles. But I'm a late bloomer in terms of getting serious about
my writing. (Same for photography.) Now, I am in a program that offers me
an abundance of inspiration, advice, and the space and structure—which I
sorely need— to write. It’s been a fantastic experience and I do worry that,
without its structure, my space will become slippery and I will begin to
flounder. But I’ve come to realize that I need to write.
I write from a place of curiosity, to learn, to know and,
fortunately, I always want to know!

I draw inspiration from the natural
world, particularly the mountains, seas, skies. Land, sea, sky: they are not
mute; they talk to me—we’re in a relationship, share a reverence for
one other, which is something I seek to emulate in my relationship with
humanity. As most of my writing is personal in nature, it consists of a lot of
interior thought—how the outer world affects the inner and vice versa—which is
oft obsessed with the interconnectedness of all things, with signifiers and
symbiosis. The lens through which I filter my experience of the world informs
how and what I write. When I say “lens” I mean that both metaphorically and
literally. Which leads me to process…

How does your writing process work?
I wish I could tell you that I rise each morning and
write. But I don’t. I’m criminally undisciplined. Sometimes I don’t write for
many days. Though I read every day, and am often lost in research (whether in
books or the interwebs). Then there’s the walk. It always starts with the
walk—a prelude to the actual act of writing. The walk sets a rhythm that
allows me to connect with the world and its swells and shifts. I
don’t leave home without my iPhone or camera, in the event I want to take
photographs while I’m walking. Photography is also a huge part of my writing
process. My handwriting is atrocious, I’m terrible at carrying a notebook, and
stuff just passes right through me, so I have come to understand that the only
way I’m able to take notes is through the lens of a camera. (Although I have,
on occasion, scratched something down on found paper in the middle of the
night. But I couldn’t later read it.) And photographing, like writing, is
also about looking, and I don’t think one can write well without
really looking.

The interesting thing about the
picture-taking is that, more often than not, I manipulate the photo, apply various
filters, so the scene looks how it appeared to me in that time now gone, or how
I think it might have appeared to me, or to a deer or a loon or some other
living thing that is also looking and processing. Sometimes the result may
have a surreal quality. (But then, what is real is
relative, and we all have our own unique filters.) The filters may skew figures
or wash out color, may highlight little corners that tend to go unnoticed, or
may shade areas that don’t wish to be revealed. Mood is set, perspective is
established, and the resulting tone and feel informs point of view. And I
remember what I felt the moment I was present to snap it, remember what I
thought, where I came from and where I’m headed. Barthes said that the
“Photographer’s organ is not his eye … but his finger: what is linked to the
trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates…” I think the
organ, the aesthetic organ, so to speak, is both eye and finger. Eye to the
world, finger to the trigger and keyboard.

Next up on the tour, look for posts from
four fantastic writers (and Bennington cohorts) who’ve agreed to accept
the torch: Megan Culhane Galbraith, Denton Loving, Susan
Pagani, and Barrett
Warner. Megan's work has been appeared in Hotel Amerika, Danse Macabre, Drafthorse, The Notebook (a recent guest editor), and Rosebud. Her essays have been featured on 51% on WAMC-FM and have been twice selected for the Bookmarks Reading Series at The Arts Center in Troy, New York. She lives on a gorgeous farm in upstate New York, and knows how to wrangle a horse and throw a party. Denton, executive editor of Drafthorse, and editor of Motif V.4 - Seeking Its Own Level: An Anthology About Writings On Water, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds (Main Street Rag); he's also the recipient of several writing awards including the Gurney Norman Prize for Short Fiction, and the Alabama Writer’s Conclave Fiction Prize; his fiction, poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Birmingham Arts Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Minnetonka Review, Main Street Rag, Nantahala Review, and in numerous anthologies including Degrees of Elevation: Stories of Contemporary Appalachia. And his southern accent woos us all. Susan is a journalist, editor extraordinaire (I know, she's handled my early drafts), foodie, and fiction and nonfiction writer. She recently coauthored The Secret Atlas of North Coast Food (Heavy Table, 2013), and contributed to Minnesota Lunch (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011). She can write about food and birds like nobody's business. Barrett, the author of Til I'm Blue in the Face (Tropos Press), and the winner of Salamander's 2014 Fiction Contest, is an editor of Free State Review. His short stories, reviews, poems and lampoons of U. S. poet laureates have appeared in Atticus Review, California Quarterly, Coal Hill Review, Comstock Review, Freshwater, Southeast Review, and many others. He says he's lazy but his work says otherwise. These, my friends: I love them (even if they make me look bad). You will, too.

It was obvious from the first phrase -- the first sentence -- of yours which I read that there would be no keeping you in place here: you were too good a writer, with too fine a mind and sensibility, for plain old blogging.

But it was fun to pretend, for a few years, that the world was different than it is -- that it might not let you out for some capricious reason. Who knows what... "She's too much a L'il Rhody girl," or "She likes photography and good music too much," some such stupid thing or other. The gods know I never wanted, y'know, an editor to hurt your feelings so much that you'd run away from the world; nothing like that. But this has been a place for a reader to be spoiled. Nobody, once spoiled, ever wants it to stop.

There's always FB, of course. But I'll tell you, woman, if the essays you've posted here are the last "collected works" we see from you, are gonna have at least one formerly spoiled and now just p!ssed off ex-reader on your hands. :)

From the outside looking in, you know I'm honestly looking forward to the new ventures. Go, girl.

The first phrase? Oy.I look back at some of my stuff and I'm embarrassed. But that is the fascinating thing about writing isn't--the more we do it the better we get. (At least I hope so!) And I don't intend on giving up blogging entirely, as you can see. After all, I'm honored to be able to spoil you.

And I WILL, be visiting you over at RAMH, as well. I know I've been a terrible friend in that regard… but well, you know what my schedule is like these days (right?). Ack. Four more months…!

You are, of course, one of the most gifted writers I've had the pleasure of visiting on Blog. While I'm saddened that this is your final post, I too have been facing changes to my entire website subject to life and career developments. Whatever changes are afoot with you, take care of yourself and know how appreciated you are with your gifts and talents. You've touched me and many others with your writing.

Amanda- Thanks so much for visiting, as always. Once I finish my graduate work, I hope to be a bit more active in the blogging community, and I'll be returning to some of my old haunts--especially to yours to find out how the book is going! Hope you're well. See you soon. :)